This one is my personal favorite. I think it defines the boundaries and differences most clearly. In my opinion, this map wins the following map contests: (a) most informative, (c) most appropriate to the data, and (d) best.
I really like this map because it was fun to make, but I don’t think it wins any of the above map contests. It isn’t any more interesting than the other two, and I think the same size dots make it hard to compare the colors because the colors aren’t touching each other. Additionally, I think it takes away from how coloring the whole county space contributes to some sense of visual understanding of the urban/rural population density differences, because the circles are all the same size.
I think maybe because there are only two distinct yellow dots/centroids are so small they have strange very purple/yellow circular spaces. It doesn’t feel that useful because unless you zoom in a ton you cannot see much of a difference in the areas with lower numbers, so just the Salt Lake and Navajo Nation areas stand out. Plus, I think the gradient doesn’t feel that useful when you can clearly see circles. I think this one wins the most interesting contest because it is immediately interesting/eye catching, though, because of the gradients and bright yellow pieces. But it just doesn’t accurately represent the distribution data (or lack thereof), so it feels more honest to simply give the whole county the same shade.Plus there is no way to see the specific numbers per county because there isn’t a specific figure to click on to get that information.
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## ellps WGS 84 in CRS definition: +proj=merc +a=6378137 +b=6378137 +lat_ts=0
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